It's the question the city faces in the wake of Tuesday's decision by Louisville leaders to turn down a 160-unit luxury apartment complex that would have replaced an abandoned Safeway grocery store at the north end of town.

The project, pitched by developer Jim Loftus, would have been the city's first major foray into infill redevelopment outside of downtown. And it would have gotten rid of a prominent eyesore at the corner of South Boulder Road and Centennial Drive.

"What happened last night means it will be a while before we see another development proposal in there," said Mayor Pro Tem Hank Dalton, who voted initially and unsuccessfully to send Loftus' proposal back to the Louisville Planning Commission for further review. "If Safeway can't sell the property for the price they want to get for it, it just remains a big empty store with a big empty parking lot in front."

Advertisement

For the small businesses at the Village Square shopping center that must continue to operate without an anchor -- the Safeway closed two years ago -- prospects for the future seem grim.

"It's disappointing," said Dan DelCarpio, general manager of Ralphie's sports bar. "I don't think the people fighting it this hard realized that it's going to remain empty. Something is better than nothing."

Georgia Landrus, of Fort Lupton, goes for a walk on her lunch break Wednesday in front of the old Safeway site in the Village Square in Louisville.
(
Jeremy Papasso
)

Nancy Adams, who was stacking old volumes at The Book Nook on Wednesday, said 200 residents living in high-end apartment units just a few hundred feet away from the store could have made a big difference in foot traffic.

"We're struggling here," she said, as she gazed out across the plaza with three prominent vacancies showing "for rent" signs in the windows. "We need something that draws people to this area."

Loftus said Wednesday that he plans to cancel his contract to buy the building from Safeway and write himself off as a failed "guinea pig" in Louisville's first attempt to redefine one of its aging commercial corridors. Never in his 38 years in business has a local government rejected a project of his, he said.

Safeway, Loftus said, is now free to sell to whomever it wants, whether that's another mixed-use developer, a discount store or a church. A broker representing the grocer declined to comment Wednesday.

"Maybe there is someone out there who thinks that site can be 50 percent residential and 50 percent retail," Loftus said.

'We can be patient'

Aquiles La Grave, a 10-year resident whose home is just north of the Village Square shopping center, said he and his neighbors want more than anything to see something replace the 55,000-square-foot building that housed the Safeway for 30 years. But it has to be the right project.

"We want to make sure that what goes in there doesn't degrade our quality of life," he said. "An empty Safeway is not impacting our neighborhood in any way except aesthetically -- so we can be patient."

Many who live near the Safeway site made it clear over a series of public hearings stretching back to February that they felt Loftus' proposal -- with its five-building footprint that stretched to four stories in height and featured 9,500 square feet of retail -- was too dense and too tall.

They said the apartments would generate too much traffic and the whole development would clash with the surrounding neighborhood.

Even after Loftus scaled back his project from 195 units and 10,000 square feet of retail, eliminating the fourth story in the process, neighborhood opposition continued.

Many, La Grave included, say the commercially zoned 5-acre site is still ripe for retail -- perhaps not a full-scale grocery store, he said, but some kind of arrangement where the city isn't giving up a large chunk of sales tax revenue to accommodate more residential units.

Mayor Bob Muckle, who voted against giving Loftus another chance before the Planning Commission, said the City Council isn't dead set against apartments or homes at the site, but retail needs to have a bigger presence.

"There needs to be more retail potential there than what the proposal was offering," he said.

Sales tax revenues in the South Boulder Road corridor plummeted after Safeway closed in May 2010, dropping from $72,577 in the first quarter of 2010 to $27,924 in the first quarter of 2011. Sales tax revenue crept up to $29,187 in the first quarter of this year.

Muckle said the city will continue to work with Safeway to get the building sold. He said he's already heard that some parties are interested in the site and thinks a new deal could come before the city within a year.

Retail sector in tough spot

But the retail sector, especially demand for a big-box store like Safeway, isn't exactly on fire right now.

Matt DeBartolomeis, vice president for CBRE's retail property services division, said in the first quarter of 2012 there were 85 big-box vacancies -- representing 3.7 million square feet of empty space -- in the Denver metro area. And the trend, he said, is for retailers to seek out smaller storefronts.

"Most retailers are downsizing their formats," he said.

That leaves the Safeway building on South Boulder Road, and the even bigger vacant Sam's Club building on McCaslin Boulevard, in a tough position, he said. DeBartolomeis is the broker for the Sam's Club.

The Safeway site has additional problems, according to market experts, who concluded that the location is no longer viable for a large-format grocery store. Not only isn't it located at a major intersection, they said, too many competing grocers in the last 20 years have built stores nearby.

Dalton, the mayor pro tem, said that might leave the door open for lower-rent businesses, like thrift stores and dollar stores, at the site but likely not the kind of higher-end retailers most municipalities covet. That is, if the city's drawn-out process for analyzing Loftus' proposal doesn't give future developers a nasty case of cold feet.

"I can only hope that a developer would take (Tuesday's) denial not as a signal to not develop, but to develop something different than what was proposed," he said.

Lightning has 5A state title aspirations once againIt was the only home plate the Legacy varsity softball field had ever known, and there it was last Saturday, in its tattered state, dug out of the playing surface and relegated to a lonely, unused existence. Full Story

The Boulder alt-country band gives its EPs names such as Death and Resurrection, and its songs bear the mark of hard truths and sin. But the punk energy behind the playing, and the sense that it's all in good fun, make it OK to dance to a song like "Death." Full Story